EDITOR'S NOTE

This week we're featuring articles about spiritual journeys — your own and others. These include:

Norman Fischer — an interview about his latest book, Sailing Home: Using Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls, which helps us understand our own spiritual journeys

Susan Moon — two articles about her spiritual journey in "I Want To Tell You About Coming Apart" and "Tea With God" (Susan will be giving a Dharma talk at Upaya on November 3)

Jason Mann — a Portland oncologist and his journey to become a chaplain — "From Doctor to Chaplain"

Roshi Joan continues her travels in Tibet, and we recently received an article and photo from CITTA Nepal about her group's visit there. If you would like to follow her progress, you can check it out through her occasional "flickr" posts, by clicking here.

Sensei Beate will be leading and participating in the Fall Practice Period: Four Foundations of Mindfulness from November 19—December 8. This period includes Deep Time with Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Study and Practice Days: The Flow of Mindfulness and Compassion, and Rohatsu Sesshin with Roshi Joan Halifax, Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, and Sensei Kazuaki Tanahashi.

Looking towards next year, Upaya's 2011 Programming and Pricing are now available for viewing and registration on the Upaya website. It's a great time to explore the opportunities and book early, giving yourself more lodging options!

NEW: Gentle Hatha Yoga at Upaya: On October 17 and November 7 from 4:10-5:10 pm, Keizan, Upaya's Temple Coordinator, will be offering Yoga classes to the public. For details, see "Upcoming Dharma Talks, Events."

And on a "light note," Lynette Genju Monteiro (a Upaya chaplaincy student) sent us this photo of her cat, Olivia, who appears to be checking out Upaya eNews. If you can think of a great caption for this photo, please send it to my attention by clicking here.

Sundays, Oct 17 and Nov 7, from 4:10-5:10 pm: Keizan will be offering Gentle Hatha Yoga classes in Dokan-ji temple (Upaya's main temple). These will be Dana classes: Keizan offers the classes as dana and guests are welcome to leave dana for him, for Upaya, or for both.

Housing for Retreat Guests: Because of limited housing at Upaya, we are requesting that the extended community let us know if you are able to house retreat guests on a donation basis or by renting a room. Please contact Roberta registrar@upaya.org. We really appreciate your generosity.

Roshi's News

After finishing the new medical center at Citta’s Hospital facility in Humla we were blessed by the visit of Roshi Joan Halifax, Roshi Enkyo O’Hara, 9 medical professionals and others on their way to visit Mount Kailash, in Tibet.

The passionate and well-organized medical team arrived fresh carrying overwhelming supplies of medicines, clothing and funds for equipment to help enhance our facility. In two days Roshi’s team had treated nearly 1000 patients! During the visit, a child was treated named Ramkala. She suffered from severe burns three weeks earlier and was left uncleaned; her wounds were infected. Also, with the support of the team, a local man coming from a day and a half walk from the hospital with severe pain from a broken arm was airlifted out of the district to Nepalgunj for advanced treatment.

After the end of the visit, the exhausted team was thanked by the local community in the form of a dance that was a “thank you” song. We were overwhelmed with this visit and look forward to an ongoing communication with members of the team and their respective medical communities back home.

Other non-medical members of Roshi’s team included film makers, photograher’s and other passionate individuals that both assisted the doctors and recorded the event to share with others back home!

At the end of this journey in Tibet, Roshi will make her sixth circumambulation of Mount Kailash, a sense of joy at her body recovering. She returns to Kathmandu and will go into retreat before her Bangalore and Delhi teachings and the Mind and Life meeting. Roshi returns to the States on November 24 and prepares for the annual Rohatsu sesshin. The sesshin is almost full, so if you are attending, registration now is advised.

Note that Roshi will be offering few programs at Upaya in the next six months. We encourage you to join her at the Rohatsu in Dec (click here), Zen Brain in Jan (click here), or Burma in Feb (click here), Chaplaincy in March, with Sharon Salzberg in April. She will be at the Library of Congress in the spring as a scholar-in-residence.

Next year, Roshi will be leading pilgrimages to Burma (Feb) and Mustang (Sept). This will be her third journey to Burma, a place she loves dearly, with people that are so resilient and tender, a landscape of great beauty, and a place of Buddhism unique in the world. In mid September next year, she goes to Mustang (Lo Montang) in Nepal, which is more Tibetan than Tibet, a wild kingdom north of the Annapurna range, with its ancient monasteries and windcarved landscape. Registration (limited) for these journeys open now. For information, click on the links for these retreats here: Burma, Mustang (Lo Montang).

Caring for the Dying and Terminally Ill Patients—Nov 15 - 17 in Delhi: For caregivers—family, friends, volunteers, nurses, doctors and administrators. On November 15 - 17, 2010, from 10 am to 5 pm. Lunch will be served (catered by the IHC). There are no charges but participants need to commit themselves to attending on all three days. And a public talk on her work with Being with Dying, Nov 18. Click here for more information and to register.

"This compelling, brave, and wise book draws from a lifetime of remarkable work with people at the end of life."—Andrew Weil, MD

"Joan Halifax has a knack for straight talk and sublime insight—a no-holds-barred approach to life's greatest challenge, dying well. This book beckons to those who dare, and those who care; it's a profound and practical guidebook to the inevitable final dance."—Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence

Roshi Joan and three close friends, John Madison, Lola Long, and Brother John, made a remarkable Pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash in 1987. They hitchhiked across the Tibetan plateau where Roshi Joan did a retreat in a cave north of Lake Manasarovar. She and her friends circumambulated Mt. Kailash and then hitchhiked back across the plateau. Watch the video here—this is an extraordinary film. Enjoy!

CONNECT WITH ROSHI

Roshi's interest in social networking reflects her early work in anthropology and her Buddhist vision of interconnectedness. Photos

Dharma Talks: The Upaya bookstore has a number of Roshi's dharma talks on DVD. Please call the front office for titles and ordering, 505-986-8518, or email upaya@upaya.org

Tibet: The Chinese filmmaker Kam Sung has made a fascinating and visually poetic account of Roshi Joan in Tibet. A high-resolution version on DVD is now available from Upaya. Email at upaya@upaya.org or call 505-986-8518 to order. See exceptional video of Roshi in Eastern Tibet done by Kam Sung: https://www.createspace.com/267427 to purchase the film or click here to view A CONSTANT PILGRIM.

CD

Roshi Joan's 6-CD series on Being with Dying (from Sounds True Audio) is now available. To order, call 505-986-8518 or email: upaya@upaya.org

Sensei Beate Genko Stolte's 2010 Teaching Schedule with Links

Nov 14: ZAZENKAI: A Daylong Meditation Retreat with Sensei Beate Genko Stolte. Click here for more information and to register.

FEATURE ARTICLES

Norman Fischer will be teaching Deep Time, November 19-21, during the Fall Practice Period at Upaya. For more information and to register, click here.__________

Author and Zen teacher Zoketsu Norman Fischer's latest book is Sailing Home: Using Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls. The book draws upon the rich mythology of The Odyssey to help us understand our own spiritual journeys.

This is not another gimmicky self-help book. It is about you and your life, in all its messiness and seeming misdirection.

In the Introduction, Fischer writes that the spiritual odyssey is "full of irony, depth, strangeness and wonder. Full of paradox. In it, everything changes and nothing changes. And we will all make this journey, each in our own way, no matter how much we insist on ignoring, denying, forgetting or working against it."

In a talk and reading from his book on July 8, 2008, at the Empty Hand Zen Center in New Rochelle, NY, Fischer led everyone in the zendo in a focused exercise, first recalling a memory from early childhood, then another memory from later in childhood. This exercise is mentioned in the interview below.

Interview With Norman Fischer

B: I was intrigued by the part of the book about false stories, because as a Zen student I've been trying not to talk to myself about myself. And this is a book about talking to myself about myself, and you were talking about false stories. Can you elaborate a little on that? What do we do with our stories? What can we learn from that? What narrative have I got going on in my head about myself, and what is that telling me?

NORMAN FISCHER: Well, in the Odyssey there's a lot of deception, a lot of false stories. And Odysseus, and sometimes Athena, tell false stories for a purpose, in order to further the plot, in order [to] get to their next point. And what I'm saying in the book is that's what we do, too.

When we have a story that we're telling ourselves that we believe, maybe, but that really isn't true, and we get into trouble in our lives because our story doesn't really fit who we are, we don't need to complain too much to ourselves. Maybe we need that false story to get..us to the next stage of life.

It's too idealistic, probably, to think that we're never going to have any stories, that we won't be telling ourselves stories. It's an acknowledgment that we are going to be telling ourselves stories, and that we're going to tell true stories and we're going to tell false stories. And both are necessary, because we're on a journey, and we're going to have to do whatever it takes to keep us going forward.

So, if we hold our stories lightly and realize that every story is temporary, and no story is the whole story, and the story may be true or it may be false, either way, it will take us where we need to go. If we have that view of our stories, we'll be less likely to be captured by them and confused by them.

B: You see them as a upaya.

NORMAN FISCHER: Yes, that's right. Look at all the deceptive stories the Buddha tells in the Lotus Sutra.

B: Like the Burning House story.

NORMAN FISCHER: Yes, exactly, the Burning House story and the Magical City story. Exactly the same.

B: As you've been talking to people about your book, have you been doing this exercise we did this evening?

NORMAN FISCHER: Yes, I've been doing this exercise. And it's worked very well.

B: What sort of things do people tell you come up for them? Anything in particular?

NORMAN FISCHER: I think they're telling me it makes them realize how many stories there are of their lives, that they could tell many, many stories that would all be true. And they realize that in fact they don't do that. They have a story that they stick to, and that they think is true, and this makes them realize there are many possible stories.

B: We edit as we go along.

NORMAN FISCHER: Yes, and we don't realize we're doing that. The stories that we tell ourselves are stories that come from a shared, materialist, socially constructed point of view. That's a story that of course we have to tell, but it's only one of the many stories. We don't see that it's a story from a social construct based on a materialist philosophy of life. We don't see it that way. We just think that's our story. We think that's really what happened. And we fail to realize that we could tell a lot of different versions of our story, and they can be quite amazing.

One of my theories is that we've all had incredibly powerful religious experiences in our lives, mostly as children, and we've literally been socialized out of them. Often we don't even remember them, because we've been taught they're not anything worth remembering or worth validating. And so they get knocked out of us. We suffer a lot for lack of it, because we're losing our imaginations as we get socialized.

Goodness knows our materialistic culture has provided tremendous material benefits to us and to others in the world, but it has impoverished our imaginations, and it's impoverished our souls to a great extent because we think this is the only world that there is. And it's only been a tiny time in human history that people believe that this is the only world that there is.

And we pretty much all believe that. Even when people insist on their spiritual experiences, they're insisting on them, almost, y'know, the lady doth protest too much. They're almost reinforcing that same view. So we need a more porous and more open view of what our lives are.

B: We get lost in the story of our culture, of our society, and sometimes later in life we wake up and say, wait a minute, who am I? What am I doing here?

NORMAN FISCHER: My previous book was called Taking Our Places. I didn't plan it this way, but I now see that Taking Our Places is a book about the first half of life, about establishing your life, and now this book is about the second half of life, coming home.

At the end I talk about death, that we get to be a certain age, and then the first thing that happens is our parents are elderly. And how many people do we all know who have parents in their 80s or 90s that the children are worried about taking care of and seeing through the last passage? And then the next thing is, it's your turn, and you turn toward that part of life. And that's part of coming home. Coming home is really coming home to silence, coming home to the end of life, and I write about that at the end of the book.

So I think the two books are companions to one another. Both of them of course are based on meditation practice, on spiritual practice and religious life. In Taking Our Places I say religious life is just growing up, it's just being a mature person. It's not a special thing. And then in this book I say, and, when you mature, you realize you have to come home.

And coming home is coming home to acceptance of a lot of life's disasters and passions and forgiveness and all the things that have happened, and then finally taking care of the end of life.

I Want to Tell You About Coming Apart: Susan Moon

Susan Moon will be giving the Dharma talk at Upaya on Wednesday, November 3rd at 5:30 pm. __________

A moving account by Susan Moon of her journey back from depression, and how her Buddhist practice both helped and hindered her.

Although I suffered from severe depression, I didn't call it that for most of the several years I was in and out of it. I thought depression was for lethargic people who stayed in bed all day. But my pain was as sharp as an ice pick. Restless in the extreme, I paced and paced, looking for a way out. The visible cause was the drawn-out and difficult end of a relationship with a lover. The invisible causes were old griefs and fears and other conditions unknown to me.

It's taboo to be depressed. When I was feeling really bad, I still went to work, though I was barely functional. If I had had the flu and felt a fraction of the pain I was in, I would have called in sick. But I couldn't call in "depressed." One day I threw a whole issue of the magazine I edit into the computer's trash can, thinking I was saving it. Then I emptied the trash. I had to hire a consultant to look for it in the virtual garbage, and eventually I got most of it back. But it was myself I wanted to throw in the trash.

Physical pain is hard to describe; psychic pain is even harder. I was in intense, moment-by-moment pain, and all I wanted was to get away from it. The pain was in the thoughts, which I didn't (and couldn't) recognize as just my thoughts. (As Buddha said, "When, for you, in the thought is just the thought, then you shall be free...") A voice in my head repeated what I took to be The Truth: I was completely alone, I would never again love or be loved by another person, I was nothing.

I spent hours every day on the phone. Once, during the 45-minute drive from my lover's home back to Berkeley, I had to stop and call a friend from a pay phone by the side of the road, so that I could drive the rest of the way, even though it was only fifteen minutes. Luckily she was home. "I just got off the Richmond Bridge," I sobbed. "I'm afraid I don't exist. My body's here, but there's nobody in it."

"You exist," she said. "How could I love you if you didn't exist? Come over right now and we'll take a walk on the Berkeley pier."

I've gained some understanding of what it must be like to have an invisible illness, like lupus or chronic fatigue syndrome. I wanted to wear a sign around my neck—I might look okay, but I'm sick!—so people wouldn't expect me to be functional.

I couldn't eat, a common symptom of depression. It wasn't just loss of appetite. Chewing itself was unbearable. A blob of bread was scary because it got in the way of breathing, and breathing was already hard enough to do. Liquids were more manageable. It occurs to me now that I'd regressed to the stage before I had teeth, when the only kind of eating I could do was sucking. So I drank hot milk with honey, and Earl Grey tea. I lost a lot of weight, something I'm always trying to do when I feel "normal," but I was too downhearted to take any pleasure from it.

Like many other depressed people, I didn't sleep well. I clutched my pillow and called out to the flapping curtains for help. I took sleeping pills—sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't. I couldn't read in the night (or during the day, for that matter) because I couldn't get past the fear to concentrate on anything.

Waking in the morning was the worst of all. The moment consciousness returned, the pain came with it. Oh no! I have to breathe my way through another day.

I didn't like getting into the shower because I didn't want to be alone with my skin. To feel my own skin and imagine that nobody would ever touch it again was unbearable. Better to swaddle myself in layers, no matter what the weather, so the skin didn't have to notice it was alone. I remembered a pale young woman who had lived next door to me years earlier, who began to wear more and more layers of clothing—a skirt over her pants, a dress over her skirt, a long shirt over her dress, then a sweater, a long coat, a cape, a hat—in Berkeley summer weather. Finally her father came and took her away to a mental hospital.

One of the worst things about being so depressed is that one becomes totally self-absorbed. I could hear other people only when they were talking about me: recommending homeopathic remedies for me, interpreting my dreams to me, telling me they loved me. During my depression, one of my adult sons had a serious bicycle accident, and my fear for his well-being snapped me out of my self-absorption for the five days he was in the hospital. I sat all night in a chair beside his hospital bed, hypervigilant, watching him sleep. I put a cool cloth on his forehead, I prayed to whoever might be listening, and I made a promise I couldn't keep: not to be depressed. if only he would be all right.

He came home to my house from the hospital, with one leg in a full cast. It was summer. He sat on the back porch of the house he'd grown up in and I washed his back. One day I walked into the living room where he was reading on the couch, and he said, "My god, what's the matter? You look like a ghost!"

Dry-mouthed with panic, I told him I had to go see my lover; we had to decide right then whether to break up. "Do you think I should stay with him?" I asked.

My son looked at me with an expression I'll never forget—a mixture of despair and love. "I don't know how to help you any more," he said. "I don't think you should be driving in the state you're in. Why don't you just stay here and be my mother?"

But I couldn't. I drove out to see the man, compelled by an irrational sense of urgency, with my son's stricken face burning in my mind.

I had then been a Zen Buddhist practitioner for more than twenty years. I assumed that my meditation practice would steady me. What could be more comforting than forty minutes in the peaceful, familiar zendo, with the sweet smell of tatami straw matting? But it didn't help. This is something I want to say: at times it made things worse. The demons in my mind took advantage of the silence. They weren't real demons, but they didn't care; they tormented me anyway.

When I sat down on a zafu, the painful thoughts arose all right, but if they passed away, it was only to make room for even more painful thoughts. I'll die alone. And, adding insult to injury: After twenty years, I'm the worst Zen student that ever was.

When I told my teachers I was disappointed that zazen didn't make me feel better, they scolded me. "You don't sit zazen to get something. You sit zazen in order to sit zazen. If you want zazen to make you feel better, it won't work." But didn't Buddha invent Buddhism in the first place to alleviate suffering? Did all those other people in the zendo really get up out of bed at five a.m. for no particular reason?

Still, I kept going back, hoping that if I meditated hard enough I'd have some sort of breakthrough. In the past, sitting in the zendo, I too had had the experience of watching my worries turn to dry powder and blow away. So now I signed up to sit Rohatsu sesshin, the week-long meditation retreat in early December that commemorates the Buddha's enlightenment. He sat down under the Bodhi tree and vowed not to get up until he saw the truth. It took him a week. I had sat many sesshins before, but maybe this would be my week.

The first day was bad. I cried quietly, not wanting to disturb the others. The second day was worse. Tears and snot dripped off my chin on to my breast. I hated myself. Nobody else will ever love me!

"Bring your attention back to your breathing," my teachers had advised me. This was like telling a person on the rack, whose arms are being pulled out of her shoulder sockets, to count her exhalations.

But I wasn't on the rack. I was in the zendo. Around me sat my dharma brothers and sisters, hands in their pretty mudras. As for my mudra, I dug the nails of my left hand deep into the palm of my right hand, feeling relief at the physical pain and the momentary proof of my existence. On the third day, during a break, I snuck away to a pay phone down the street and called my sister in Philadelphia. Choking on my own words, I told her I didn't know who I was. I wasn't exactly convinced by her reassurances, but just hearing her voice was some comfort.

The fourth day was worse yet. The distance between me and the people on either side of me was infinite, though their half-lotus knees were only six inches away from mine. I thought of the lover who wasn't going to be taking care of me after all. I'm nobody, I thought. There's nobody here at all. This feeling of no-self was supposedly the point of meditation, and yet I had somehow gotten on to the wrong path. While a nameless pressure mounted inside me, the people around me just kept sitting zazen. I couldn't stay another second. I left without getting permission from the sesshin director.

Driving away from the zendo in the privacy of my car, I shouted: "This is the worst day of my life!" (There would be other days after that when I would say it again: "No, this day is worse.") I drove into Tilden Park and walked into the woods, where no one could see me. I screamed and pulled my hair. I lay down on the ground and rolled down the hill, letting the underbrush scratch and poke me. I liked having leaves get stuck in my hair and clothing. It made me feel real. I picked up a fallen branch from a redwood tree and began flailing myself on the back. The bodily pain was easier to bear than the mental pain it pushed aside.

But I scared myself. How could I be spending my sesshin afternoon beating myself with sticks in the woods? How had it come to this? I picked the leaves out of my hair and went home. The next morning, the fifth day, I called the Zen Center and said I wasn't feeling well—an understatement if ever there was one—and wouldn't be sitting the rest of the sesshin. I didn't sit zazen for some months after that.

I thought I had failed in my practice—twenty years of it!—and I was bitterly disappointed in myself. Only after the depression subsided did I see what growth that represented: choosing not to sit was choosing not to be ruled by dogma, to be compassionate with myself, to take my spiritual practice into my own hands.

Buddhism teaches that we have "no fixed self." There is nothing permanent about us During the depression, I wasn't my "self," as we say. I didn't seem to have a self at all, in a way that cruelly mimicked this central point in Buddhist teaching. You'd think that it would be painless to have no self, because without a self, who was there to be in pain? And yet there was unbearable pain. Like a wind-up doll, I went stiffly through the motions of being Sue Moon, but there was no person present, no aliveness—only a battery that was running down.

I felt angry at Buddhism, as if to say: You told me there's no fixed self, and I believed you, and look where it got me! I knew the yang of it but not the yin—the balancing truth that there was no separation.

I couldn't have gone on like this indefinitely. I was tearing up the fabric of my life. As I was weeping to my friend Melody on the phone one afternoon, speaking my familiar litany, she suddenly shouted at me: "Stop it! You've got to save your own life! You've got to do it! Nobody else but you can save yourself, and you can do it! You just have to be brave. That's all there is to it." This was an important phone call: she startled me into finding a stick of courage, and I held on to it by reminding myself of her words.

Still, the misery continued, and I finally decided to try medication. I consulted a psychiatrist, who prescribed Prozac. I took it for about a week and felt much worse, though I wouldn't have thought it possible to feel worse. The psychiatrist had me stop the Prozac and try Zoloft. I felt it kick in after a couple of days. I didn't feel drugged; I felt, rather, as though a deadly fog were lifting.

Zoloft is supposed to be good for people who have trouble with obsessional thinking, and I seem to be one of those. Zoloft did what zazen didn't do—it quieted the voices in my head: I hate him. I hate myself. It didn't shut them up entirely, but they weren't as loud and I was sometimes able to turn away from them.

I had a lot of resistance to taking medication. I thought my unhappiness had two parts: negative circumstances in the outside world, which Zoloft obviously couldn't fix, and negative attitudes inside my head, which I thought my Buddhist practice should take care of. Besides, an orthodox Zen voice whispered in my mind that the monks of old got along without Zoloft. But some of those monks probably obsessed their lives away in misery; others may have left the monastery because they couldn't concentrate. Buddhist history doesn't tell us about the ones who tried and failed, the ones with attention deficit disorder or clinical depression.

I was learning to trust myself. Taking Zoloft and stopping sitting were both acts of faith in myself. So, too, I learned to construct my own spiritual practice. Every morning, as soon as I got out of bed, I lit a candle on my little altar and offered a stick of incense. I made three full bows, then stood before the altar, my palms pressed together, and recited out loud my morning prayers, starting with a child's prayer a Catholic friend had taught me:

Angel of God, my guardian dear,To whom God's love commits me here, Ever this day be at my side To watch and guard, to rule and guide.

It was comforting to ask somebody else, somebody who wasn't me, to help me. Prayer was something I missed in Zen practice as I knew it, so I imported it from Christianity and other Buddhist traditions. I prayed to Tara, Tibetan goddess of compassion, to fly down from the sky, all green and shining, into my heart. I prayed to Prajnaparamita, the mother of all Buddhas, who "brings light so that all fear and distress may be forsaken, and disperses the gloom and darkness of delusion." Then I took refuge in buddha, dharma and sangha, saying the words out loud, whether I felt anything or not.

That I had shaped this practice for myself gave me confidence. And the early morning incense smoke, though it was thin and drifting, provided a hint of continuity for my days. They seemed, after all, to be days in the same life. One person's life—mine.

Now I can say this: there are times in life when nothing helps, when you just have to feel terrible for a while. All you can do is go through the agony and come out the other end of it. It's a gift, in a way, to hit the bottom (though it doesn't feel that way at the time). If you lie on the grass, you can't fall down.

There's a saying in Zen that "inquiry and response come up together." Perhaps that's what prayer is. To make an inquiry is already to get a response, because asking implies that there's something else there. And there's not even a time lag. The moment you're asking for help, you're already getting it, though it may not be the help you thought you wanted. Once, when I called Zen teacher Reb Anderson in despair, he came to Berkeley to see me. We sat on a park bench in a playground, and he told me, "The universe is already taking care of you." I said this mantra to myself over and over: "The universe is already taking care of me."

One late afternoon at the end of a hard summer, while I was visiting friends on Cape Cod, I walked barefoot and alone down the beach and into the salty water. There were no people about, so I took off my bathing suit in the water and flung it up on the sand. I swam and swam and felt the water touching every part of me. I was in it—no dry place left. I wasn't afraid to be alone with my skin because I wasn't alone; there was nothing, not the width of a cell, between me and the rest of the universe. I did a somersault under the water and looked up at the shiny membrane above me. My head hatched into the light, and I breathed the air and knew that I would be all right. No, not would be, but was already. I was back in my life.

I'm more than two years out of the desolation, and I still don't know why I suffered so much, or why I stopped. I can neither blame myself for the suffering nor take credit for its cessation. I sit again—I mean on a zafu—but not as much as I used to. I also bow and chant and pray. I've stopped taking Zoloft, though I'd return to it without shame if I thought it would be useful.

I practice curiosity. What is it to be born a human being? What does it mean to be embodied in your separate skin? There are many other (and more reliable) paths out of the delusion of separation besides having a boyfriend—things like writing and swimming, for example. And most of all, there's studying this human life. You could call it buddhadharma, or you could call it something else. It doesn't matter.

I now admit that I sit zazen for a reason: I want to understand who I am (if anybody), and how I'm connected to the rest of it. And yes, I want to stop suffering and I want to help others stop suffering. When I was in despair, time passed slowly, so slowly. Now it sweeps by faster and faster, gathering momentum. The shortness of life stuns me. ___________

Susan Moon is the former editor of Turning Wheel, the journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and author of the satire The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi.

I Want to Tell You about Coming Apart, Susan Moon, Shambhala Sun, November 2001.

Tea With God: Susan Moon

As a child, I worried about whether or not to believe in God. He was hardly ever mentioned in our family, except in my mother’s exclamations, so I didn’t know if he was real or not, but if he was and I didn’t believe in him, I thought it would hurt his feelings. I decided to try and make contact, by making a place for him where he knew he’d be welcome. It was under a forsythia bush in our backyard, in the cave formed by its hanging branches. Inside that dim chapel, I cleared the ground of leaves and, though I didn’t know what an altar was, I built a fairy table out of twigs and mud, about six inches high. I covered it with a tablecloth I made out of the heads of pansies, blue and purple, laid like overlapping shingles. I sat there in the close-to-dark, pleased with the holy place of mud I’d made. I wanted to talk to God, but I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there.

The next day I crawled back in and saw that the place I had fixed up for God was now alive with big black ants. They drove like tiny cars in a traffic jam across the top of the altar, dragging away with them large pieces of the pansy petals for their larder. They had wrecked it — it was gross, not holy at all. I didn’t think God would ever come there even if he did exist.

When I was a teenager, I went to Quaker meeting and tried to talk to God there, but I only worried about my French homework. What was wrong with me? I found that if I closed my eyes and rolled them up inside my head, and aimed them at the place above my nose where Hindus put a red spot, I felt something new and strange — a vertigo, a lifting, verging on a headache. Could this be God? If so, he didn’t speak to me, nor I to him, and after a while I gave up that method.

*

When my son was four, he said, “I just found out how you can see God.” He was lying down in the back seat of the car (in the days before car seats), on the way home from nursery school. “You squeeze your eyes shut, as tight as you can, and you see a blue light, and that’s God.” I tried it — later, of course, not while I was driving-but it didn’t work for me.

*

When I began to practice Zen, it didn’t matter any more whether I could talk to God or he to me — Zen people don’t go in for that. It was a relief to stop worrying about God for awhile, though now I worried that I didn’t know how to meditate. It looked like I was meditating from the outside, but I was just sitting there, thinking random thoughts, and breathing. Nothing was happening. That’s what I still do — just sit, and nothing still happens. By now I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve learned that that’s what Zen practice is: “just sitting.” Still, sometimes it feels lonesome.

I’m getting to the point of my story.

I have no mate; I sleep alone. When I rise, I always drink a cup of green tea, and I watch the day begin. I brew the tea for three minutes in a red iron pot with dragonflies on it, and then I pour it into a white cup with a blue rim.

On Sundays I don’t set the alarm. One Sunday not so long ago I opened my eyes to a foggy morning. The bed was warm and I didn’t have to go to work. I thought with pleasure about how good it was going to be to drink my tea. But the catch was, I didn’t want to get out of bed.

I had no idea I was going to speak, but suddenly, to my surprise, I said out loud, “God, I have a favor to ask you. Would you bring me a cup of green tea?” It seemed a small thing to ask, especially when you consider that I had never really asked God for anything before.

Then God answered me, out loud, and that surprised me, too. His voice came out of my own mouth. “I’m sorry, Sue,” he said. “I would if I could, but I don’t have the arms and legs the job calls for. But I completely support you in getting yourself a cup of tea. I’m with you all the way!”

I saw that he really wasn’t going to do it. “But God,” I said, “I don’t have anybody to bring me tea in bed.” God said, “That’s not my fault. The fact that there’s nobody in the bed with you is the result of choices you yourself have made. Anyway, I’m right here. I’ll be glad to go down to the kitchen with you.”

I could tell that he meant it and I was deeply touched. I tossed back the quilt with a burst of zeal, and swung my bare feet to the cold floor.

I heard God say, just under his breath this time, “You go, Sue!”

*

While the tea brewed, I had three minutes to think of the times when I had had husband or lover in the morning bed, and as far as I could remember, none of them had ever brought me tea on Sunday morning. Maybe I never asked.

I sat on the porch with the blue-rimmed cup in my hands. The tea slaked my thirst, and I just sat there, watching a squirrel who was eating the buds of the passion vine on the roof next door.

Dr. Jason Mann rubs hand sanitizer over his palms and fingers before announcing himself with a polite knock and gingerly stepping into a small room on the fifth floor of the Providence Portland Medical Center.

Michael Albright smiles his recognition and greets him from an inclined bed with a view of sterile walls, a small TV and a large window.

"You were terrific at that conference. ... My heart was really moved by your journey," Mann tells him, before launching into a conversation about Albright's cat, Sleazy.

Not exactly the bedside manner you'd expect from a doctor. But Jason Mann isn't your typical doctor. In fact, he's not here as a doctor at all — he's finishing his training to become a hospital chaplain.

Mann, 60, has had a 30-year career working as an oncologist in the Boston area and in Portland with Kaiser Permanente. He always considered himself a relationship-focused doctor, so close friends and family weren't surprised when he decided to leave oncology for chaplaincy and applied for Providence's yearlong Clinical Pastoral Education residency program.

"I decided that there was a piece of people's lives that I didn't really understand how to navigate," Mann says. "I really knew how to navigate their physical stuff, I really knew how to navigate their emotional lives, but I really had never been trained or spent any time figuring out how to understand their spiritual lives."

Spiritual Tradition

The CPE program at Providence is very competitive, accepting only five residency students at a time. On Friday, Mann and four other chaplains will graduate, and a new group will arrive Sept. 27.

"Our goal is really to help people integrate their personal story, their faith tradition and the behavioral sciences," says Sandy Walker, the CPE supervisor.

The CPE residency program incorporates visits with hospital patients, group seminars, educational seminars, writing, reflection and academics to help students gain both the theoretical and the personal knowledge essential to becoming a chaplain. Most important, Walker says, it's about understanding yourself and your own experiences to become the best listener and supporter for other people.

"It's almost like being an intern again," Mann says of the challenging program and long hours.

Though all CPE program candidates need to belong to a spiritual tradition (Mann is Jewish), and part of the requirement for board certification is the endorsement of a spiritual group, a chaplain's role is nondenominational and often not religious at all. Mann says that he has meaningful conversations with atheists and, often, religion doesn't come up during a visit.

"We hold that all people have a spiritual nature," Walker says. "Making meaning out of their lives is a profoundly spiritual activity, and people have to work hard to find meaning in their suffering and their illness and their pain. ... It's very difficult to stand in the face of suffering and to honor that."

Another CPE student pursuing board certification, the Rev. Jill Rowland, has been a Lutheran pastor since 1994 and a hospital chaplain for seven years. She acknowledges the profound impact her faith background has on her worldview but is comfortable talking to everyone. Especially in such a spiritually diverse state as Oregon, she says it's important to be able to connect with and counsel everyone.

"Being a chaplain, you have to be there for people from all different walks of life," Rowland says. "For me, CPE has helped me know who I am so that I can be with others as they're figuring out who they are or figuring out the painful experience that they're going through."

Teaching Others

Mann says he has always valued doctor-patient relationships throughout his medical career. It's what drew him to oncology, at a time when technology was nowhere near where it is today. Dealing with terminally ill cancer patients required that he be adept at dealing with suffering and death. In spite of that, he never understood the role that chaplains could play in patient care and referred a patient to a chaplain only once when he was faced with a spiritual question he couldn't answer. That situation helped open his eyes to the importance of patients' spiritual well-being, and last year he applied to Providence's CPE program to pursue it further.

"It's really kind of nice to have someone to come in and see you when you're in a scary place and sit with you with nothing on the agenda other than to sit with you, to get to know you, help you figure out what's going on," Mann says. "I would've loved to provide that service as a doctor. I provided a little bit of it, but I had to figure out their potassiums, their blood tests, had to figure out what their chemotherapy would be."

At Providence, Mann has tried to stay away from the cancer floor, focusing instead on helping patients he is not used to dealing with. Often, patients who aren't at the end of their life present the most challenging circumstances, and it's been hard for Mann to get used to helping drug addicts, homeless people or others with severe problems in their lives.

With his chaplaincy training, Mann hopes to put his knowledge and experience to use in some sort of teaching position. He is planning a seminar for medical students on empathy as an exam room tool.

"One of the tasks I see in my life as it evolves from here is to help doctors understand what the role of spiritual care is in patient care," he says. "As technology gets more and more developed, doctors become less and less comfortable with nontechnical, nonmeasurable things like relationship. They almost fear that they're going to rely on that so much that they're not going to use the technology properly. ... And I think the reality is you can do both."

Regardless of the path the rest of his career takes, Mann knows that chaplaincy is here to stay for him.

"I'm a healer," he says. "And I've always been a healer. So when I can spend time with people and feel that my energy, my presence with them, my ability to listen to them, provides some kind of healing to whatever pain they're feeling, whether it's emotional, spiritual or physical pain ... that feels so damn good. It's that healing energy I've had, and now I don't have to give chemotherapy and deal with all the side effects to get it. Now I can just appreciate the healing power of relationship."

With graduation fast approaching, Mann feels confident as a chaplain and in all he's learned through the CPE program. But he knows he's no expert — experience is really the best teacher.

"When I was an oncologist, my 30th year was the best I was," Mann says. "So I'm sure if I do this for 30 years, by the time I'm 90, I'll be one hell of a chaplain."

WEB LINKS

NPR Interview — June 25th, 2010 — “There’s no such thing as a hermetically sealed religion or culture. We human beings have been talking to each other since the beginning, and every time we talk to each other we change each other.” Watch more of correspondent Kate Olson’s interview about meditation with Zen Buddhist priest Norman Fischer. Click here.

DHARMA PODCAST: "The Perfection of Patience" and "Depression: The Vortex of Rumination"

UPAYA'S PROGRAMS

From the crystalline Andaman Sea to the winding Ayerwaddy River, from the green Shan mountains to shining Lake Inle, from the thousands of stupas of Bagan to the great shrine of Shwedagon, we pilgrimage through Burma as a kalyanamitra, a sangha of kindness, as we meet the Burmese people, practice in her temples, offer alms to her monks and nuns, and come home to the old Buddhism of this imperiled nation....

For details about this trip on the program link, click here. For additional information and registration contact: coo@upaya.org or registrar@upaya.org. We will need a 50% deposit by November 3, 2010 and final/full payment by December 16, 2010.

Path of Service and Other Ways To Be at Upaya

A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things that renew humanity. —Buddha

Path of Service: Upaya is accepting applications for our Path of Service resident program, inviting practitioners to live and serve here from three months to a year or more. For more information and to apply click here or contact: pos@upaya.org

This is a wonderful way to give of your energy, deepen your Buddhist practice, and be in a thriving sangha. Enjoy and learn from the opportunity to receive zen teachings from Roshi Joan Halifax, Sensei Beate Genko Stolte and many other extraordinary teachers; hear weekly seminars and dharma talks; have dokusan with Sensei Beate, and experience the deep joy of living in community.

Personal Retreat/Guest Practitioner: Quiet, still, peaceful — Upaya is a special place in the fall with intimate rooms, kiva fireplaces, and breathtaking views. Spend some time here and find your own rhythm as a personal retreatant. To learn more about enjoying a peronal retreat at Upaya or coming as a guest practitioner, please contact Roberta at 505-986-8518 X12, registrar@upaya.org or click here.

Volunteer at our front desk, kitchen, garden or in housekeeping. Our volunteer program is intended for people who wish to contribute to Upaya and spend time working with the resident sangha; it is non-residential. For those who have the financial need, volunteer hours can be exchanged for retreat participation. In that case, a $10 hourly rate is credited for your work, and a maximum of 80% of the tuition may be earned and must be earned in advance of the event. Contact Roberta 505-986 8518, ext 12 or registrar@upaya.org.

Engaged Buddhism at Upaya

There are so many ways we can serve our communities. Please read on for information on Upaya's service programs on homelessness, caring for the sick and those in prison, as well as our "Upaya Compassionate Action Network."

Metta Refuge Council: Tuesday, 9:45 a.m., a meeting for people who are ill, their caregivers, hospice volunteers, nurses, and those interested in exploring issues around sickness, aging, and death. Beginning around 11:20 a.m. until 12:05 p.m. the group engages in contemplative writing as a way to explore what is present for people in the moment. No writing experience is needed. For more information, please contact Susan Benjamin at ArtTherapy@aol.com. For details: http://www.upaya.org/action/caring.php

TheUpaya Prison Project serves prison residents at Santa Fe County Adult Detention Center and the Penitentiary of New Mexico. New volunteers are starting training to work "inside", teaching stress management through meditation, simple yoga, and confidential conversation in a protected place. More volunteers are needed to teach life skills and social skills. If this interests you, email Ray Olson at nanrayols@aol.com.

UCAN! is the Upaya Compassionate Action Network. Every season, UCAN highlights a social or political issue, gives background on that issue from a spiritual perspective, and suggests a way that you can translate your insights into skillful action. The current focus is immigration. To learn more, please click here.

Upaya is now a member of the Interfaith Leadership Alliance of Santa Fe. Residents, Chaplaincy Students, and staff are collaborating with this critical community organization in addressing the needs of those who are homeless in our community. We donated time and resources to the Winter Overflow Shelter located at the old Pete's Pets building on Cerrillos. Sangha members are all welcome to participate on Upaya's behalf how, where, and when possible. If interested, please contact Natalie Calia at Natalie@upaya.org or call 505-986-8518 ext 17.

Please help support our projects by making a donation to Upaya Zen Center for the Metta Program or Upaya Prison Project. We are deeply grateful for any donation.

Upaya's Buddhist Chaplaincy Program

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.—Thomas Merton

Chaplaincy Program Website. Based on the work of the late Francisco Varela and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, this visionary two-year program brings together science, systems theory, practice, and humanism in a powerful way with Roshi Joan Halifax, Roshi Bernie Glassman, Sensei Fleet Maull, Father John Dear, Rabbi Malka Drucker, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and an exceptional faculty next year. For more info, see the program website or contact program director Maia Duerr at chaplaincy@upaya.org

A few spaces are still available in the 2011 cohort. Next year's core faculty includes Roshi Joan Halifax, Roshi Bernie Glassman, Sensei Fleet Maull, Cheri Maples, and Merle Lefkoff.

The Chaplaincy Scholarship Fund has been created to offer tuition scholarships for outstanding students who would not otherwise be able to attend Upaya's two-year Buddhist Chaplaincy Program. We invite you to support this fund by donating here.

Once we have the fund fully established, we will let prospective candidates know how to apply for scholarships.

Thank you for your support!

Prajna Mountain Forest Refuge

Prajna Mountain Forest Refuge is a place of deep quiet and vastness, simplicity and hermit practice. Individuals do their own solo practice, hermit style. A few indoor beds but mostly camping in the gorgeous green meadows and forests. Outhouse, simple bathing facilities, camp kitchen with woodstove.

WANTED (THROUGH MID-NOVEMBER): Volunteers/apprentices for making adobe floor and earth plaster walls from native soil at the Yogi's earth shelter hermitages, also for moving and splitting firewood, putting the garden to bed, raking leaves for compost, sifting sawdust for the garden and compost, and cooking. Contact Marty if you're interested at mvpeale@gmail.com. Minimum stay of two days.

Are you preparing your gardens for fall?

Request — for anyone living in or near Santa Fe/Albuquerque:

As part of developing Upaya's vegetable and flower gardens, we will be expanding the number and variety of plants we are growing. So, when you prepare your own gardens for winter, please help out by bringing excess plants you have to Upaya. For more information, you can call Upaya and leave a message for Maria. Or send her an email at: upaya@upaya.org

Upaya Scholarship Fund

Your donation to The Upaya Scholarship Fund will provide students of all ages and backgrounds with the means to participate in our programs and retreats. Please help support those in need by contributing to the fund.

Throughout the year, we receive many requests for financial assistance and would love to be able to meet everyone’s needs. With your generous donation we will be able to reach out more.

Monetary donations can be made by phone, mail, or online. International donations can be made securely online using PayPal. By phone we accept cash, check, MasterCard, and Visa. Please click here to make a donation.

Thank you in advance for any assistance you can give!

Become a Member

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.—Dalai Lama

Become a member online. Your membership gives so much to Upaya, and we in turn offer free podcasts, daily practice, teachings, our weekly newsletter, videos, and service to the homeless, those in prisons, and at the end of life. We invite you to become a member of Upaya...

and support all that happens in this unique place of practice.For less than the cost of an evening out, your monthly donation will make a real difference in sustaining Roshi's work, Sensei Beate's teachings, and Upaya's existence.